Paki Smith 32A

Artist Statement

Tommy Weir (Producer): I knew Paki Smith, our production designer, from my time working in galleries and when Paki was painting. We bumped into him in Ardmore studios between meetings and he was on his way to LA. I hadn’t seen him in years and we told him what we were doing and got him the script.

Marian Quinn (Writer/Director): It was a brave designer who’d take on 32A, given that it’s a period film on a tiny budget, and so his strategy was to focus on having a great team around him, which was the right thing to do. They scoured car boot sales for months and convinced my friend’s mother to give over her home as the principal location. It’s not easy shooting in a semi-d built in the Fifties but he felt that this house had an authenticity that we couldn’t match elsewhere. We wanted Maeve’s house to have a lot of color and clutter and chaos, in comparison to Ruth’s which was sparsely furnished and with pale colours. Neither Paki nor Driscoll took on the Seventies with a capital S because it’s a subtle story and the design couldn’t overpower it. So we didn’t go crazy with the wallpapers and the patterns.